While walking across University Avenue in St. Paul early Friday morning, I saw a peregrine falcon descending toward the Walmart parking lot at incredible speed, passing directly over my head before landing in a tree north of the old Midway Chevrolet dealership. What caught my eye was its very light underbody plumage - almost uniformly white, with a narrow dark "slash" visible in the secondary feathers close to the body. I haven't been able to find an illustration or photo that shows a peregrine with such light plumage, but is that unusual? I don't see peregrines often enough to have a good sense of the variability in their plumage.
In any event, this was definitely my best "Walmart parking lot" bird, ever. ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
